But rather than looking to rebuild bridges with these growing population centers, Trump appears determined to use them as a foil to energize his predominantly non-urban base.
“He wants to portray cities as alien to the two-car garage in Naperville,” outgoing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told me in an interview, referring to a suburb west of his city. “They want to make the soccer mom more scared.”
Big city mayors mostly greeted Trump’s public musings about sending them undocumented immigrants with contempt. “America was a sanctuary country before Chicago was a sanctuary city,” Emanuel told me. “Send them: we’ll welcome them, and we’ll enroll their kids in our schools.”
It’s far from clear whether Trump has the legal authority to forcibly relocate undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers to big cities as he’s suggested.
But even the brandishing of the threat extends his extraordinarily antagonistic relationship with the nation’s metropolitan centers. The irony is that Trump himself is a product of urban politics, real estate celebrity and tabloid culture in New York City — not a suburban, much less rural, environment.
Trump’s policies have cost cities
Cities now face a “dead ball” era of indifference — if not hostility — from the federal government, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told me earlier this month when I interviewed him at an Atlantic event.
“There is not again a federal affordable housing policy,” he said at the time. “There’s not a federal policy to address income inequality; there’s not a federal early childhood education policy; there’s not a federal affordable housing policy.”
Moving the GOP from ‘the country club to the country’
Trump has bracketed these policy proposals with frequent rhetorical attacks in which he’s portrayed major cities — particularly Chicago — as crime ridden and chaotic. “His goal is to drive a wedge between suburban and urban,” Emanuel charges. “He’s trying to make cities scary to the core suburban voter.”
Trump’s confrontational relationship with the largest cities extends his central political strategy of focusing almost entirely on energizing his political base even at the expense of heightening resistance from the voters outside of it. Demographically, that means tolerating intense antipathy from younger voters, minorities and many college-educated white voters in service of mobilizing older, evangelical and blue-collar whites. Geographically, that means accepting huge deficits in urban and inner-suburban areas at the cost of expanding the GOP advantages in exurban, small town and rural communities.
The GOP’s retreat in major metropolitan areas and growing reliance on small town and rural voters predates Trump’s rise. But that shift — what former Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis calls the GOP’s transition “from the country club to the country” — has demonstrably accelerated as Trump has redefined the party around his racially-infused economic nationalism.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried a comparable 87 of the 100 largest counties against Trump, but she significantly expanded on Obama’s total vote margin in those places.
Obama in 2012 carried the 100 largest counties by a combined 11.6 million votes. That was itself a big increase from Al Gore’s margin of 6.8 million votes over Bush in the 100 largest counties as of 2000.
But in 2016, Clinton won the 100 largest counties by nearly 14.7 million votes, over a quarter more than Obama did. In places from Seattle (Kings County) and Los Angeles to Houston (Harris County), New York and Miami (Miami-Dade), Clinton amassed significantly greater vote margins than Obama just four years earlier. Clinton won Harris County, for instance, by about 162,000 votes after Obama carried it by less than 1,000. She won Seattle by 110,000 more votes than Obama did and LA by over 360,000 more.
Clinton was badly hurt by slight declines in her margins in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and a larger slip in Detroit, three heavily African-American cities where black turnout ebbed relative to 2012. But overall, Trump faced a historic repudiation in the largest places: those 100 counties alone provided more than half of Clinton’s total votes.
2018 was a turning point
The Republican retreat in major metropolitan areas accelerated in the 2018 midterm elections. Trump, as noted above, won only 13 of the 100 largest counties in 2016. Over half of even that small group moved toward the Democrats in key statewide races in 2018.
In Arizona, Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema’s victory in Maricopa County around Phoenix– the largest county that Trump won two years earlier — was central to her statewide win. In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke narrowly carried Tarrant County (Fort Worth), the second largest county that voted for Trump in 2016. In New York, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand carried Suffolk County, the third largest Trump county (though voters there also supported Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin in the House). In Florida, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum won Florida’s Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), the fourth largest county that Trump won.
In the House, Democrats last year consolidated their dominance in urban areas. According to the innovative system the CityLab website has developed for ranking House seats on an urban to rural continuum, Democrats emerged from the 2018 election holding 149 of the 165 seats in the three most urban categories of districts. Before the election, Republicans had held 35 seats in the three most urban groupings. Republicans, CityLab found, also suffered big losses in the “sparse suburban” category of House seats that represent the boundary between more urbanized and small town/rural areas.
The flip side of the GOP’s urban unraveling under Trump is a consolidation of its hold over smaller communities. In 2016, though Clinton won 87 of the 100 largest counties, Trump won about 2,600 of the other 3,000 — the most for any nominee in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984. In several pivotal states, such as North Carolina and Florida, he overcame big deficits in urban areas with unprecedented margins and turnout in small town and rural places.
Trump is wagering the 2020 election, and possibly the GOP’s future for years beyond, on a very different bet: that the party has more to gain from castigating the nation’s largest cities than from courting them.
Source : Nbcnewyork